Urgent concerns about the expansion and
growth of the EU's transport infrastructure are expressed in a new
report published by the European Environment Agency. Much of the gain
achieved through regulating vehicle and fuel standards is being
outweighed by increasing transport volumes and heavier and more
powerful vehicles, says the report. It is the first output of the the
Transport and Environment Reporting Mechanism (TERM), set up by the
Commission and the EEA at the suggestion of the joint Transport and
Environment Council to gauge progress of integration policies in the
transport sector.

The first TERM report ("Are we moving in
the right Direction? Indicators on transport and environment
integration in the EU") says transport has become one of the major
contributors to several important environment impacts: climate change,
acidification, local air pollution, loss in biodiversity and noise.
CO2 emissions in the EU have increased by 40% since 1985 as
a result of traffic growth (in particular of road and air traffic), the
use of heavier and more powerful cars, and the linked growth in energy
consumption.

Emissions are expected to increase by a
further 30% by 2010. Environmental regulations have since the early
1990s led to a decrease in emissions of NOx and NMVOCs, but
additional efforts are still needed to meet the EU emission reduction
targets. While individual cars and lorries are as much as 90% less
noisy than in the 1970s, noise remains a problem because of the
doubling of traffic volumes in that same period. More than 30% of the
EU's population is subjected to high road traffic noise, about 10% to
high rail noise and about the same proportion to noise from air
traffic.

Only 48% of the petrol-driven cars in the EU
are fitted with a catalytic converter. A major success story is the
phase-out of leaded petrol, which is expected to be completed by 2005,
it says. An average of 10 hectares of land per day are taken for new
motorways, which have grown by more than 50% since 1970 while, at the
same time, the length of conventional railway lines and inland
waterways has decreased by 8%.

Transport infrastructure now covers 1.2% of
the total EU land area. The number of road fatalities -- 44,000
throughout the EU in 1996 -- has been falling since the 1970s, but the
rate of improvement has slowed in the past few years, again due to the
growth in passenger transport volumes, with the EU car fleet increasing
by 150% since 1970, bringing car ownership to 454 per 1,000
people.

Increased policy impetus is needed to reduce
the link between transport demand and economic growth and to shift the
balance towards less environment-damaging transport modes. This
requires more preventative actions to be taken by the sectoral
(transport and planning) ministries. If policies are to integrate
environmental and other sustainability concerns into transport
decision-making, key indicators must be identified so that the success
and failure of these policies can be measured. TERM sets out 31
indicators to answer seven basic questions in an attempt to monitor
progress and highlight changes in key leverage points for policy
intervention.

The report calls for improvements in the
compiling and reporting of data in order to achieve a better
understanding of the causal links between the driving forces of
transport demand, how these exert pressures and impact on the
environment and people, and the effectiveness of policy responses to
remedy these pressures and impacts. The setting of quantifiable
intermediate and long-term transport and environmental targets is
another prerequisite.